The London Necropolis Railway and A Visit To Brookwood Cemetery

If you walk along Westminster Bridge Road, not far from Waterloo Station, you will pass by an unusual looking building, one that very much stands out from its neighbours.

It goes overlooked by many but this is one of the only surviving remnants of one of the strangest chapters in London’s history. Built in 1900, this was constructed as the grand entrance-way to the London Necropolis Railway, or Victorian London’s ‘Railway for the Dead’. 

Read on for the history of the railway, as well as what I saw when I visited the UK’s largest cemetery.

19th Century London 

London’s population exploded in the 19th century. In 1800 the population was roughly 1 million, by 1850 this was just under 2.5 million. By 1900 it had grown to 6 million. Thousands were moving from the countryside into cities with the enclosure of traditional farmland and the accelerating industrial revolution led to a huge demand for labour in factories. This was supplemented by large numbers coming from places like Ireland after the potato famine and elsewhere in the growing British Empire. 

By the 1840s and 50s London’s inner-city churchyards and graveyards were full. Cholera outbreaks, particularly those in 1848-49, only exacerbated the problem. 

From the 1830s the Government had encouraged private enterprise to step in and help solve the problem of where to bury people. This is when we have the establishment of what became known as the ‘Magnificent Seven’ cemeteries, dotted around the city. The first was Kensal Green in 1832 and the last being Tower Hamlets in 1841. I have written about Highgate Cemetery before here.

Brookwood Cemetery 

In 1852 the London Necropolis and National Mausoleum Company was established by an Act of Parliament.

That same year the company purchased a roughly 2000 acre tract of land, formerly Woking Common, from the Earl of Onslow. They then used 500 acres of that to set up a huge cemetery. At the time it was the largest cemetery in the world, known initially as Woking Necropolis and later known as Brookwood Cemetery. 

That was, in a way, the first problem solved, there was now plenty of room for burials. The next challenge was transporting mourners and the dead the 23 miles out to Surrey for the burials and funerals. They therefore set up a specific new railway line called the London Necropolis Railway, running from Waterloo to Brookwood. 

The London Necropolis Railway

The railway ran predominantly on the railway lines that already existed, but had a spur off at each end.

They had their own trains and carriages and their own entrance building at Waterloo Station.

It had waiting rooms for mourners, a hydraulic lift to take coffins up to platform level and the railway arches, despite the protestations of local residents, were used to store bodies awaiting burial. 

In 1899 the Necropolis Railway building was blocking the expansion of Waterloo Station. London and South Western Railway (LSWR) purchased the land back and built the London Necropolis Railway a new station on Westminster Bridge Road. 

The new terminus on Westminster Bridge Road opened in 1902. 

Class Segregation

In true Victorian style you could book a First, Second or Third class funeral. A First class funeral allowed you to select the grave-site in the cemetery. Second class allowed you some control over the burial location and Third class meant that your friend or relative was buried in a pauper’s section of the cemetery.

There were also First, Second and Third class carriages for mourners, as well as separate carriages for different religions. The 1852 Burial Act required that all new cemeteries should include a ‘non-consecrated’ section, providing burial space for people not part of the Church of England. 

There were also, bizarrely, separate carriages for First, Second and Third class coffins. Before the railway was in operation, the Bishop of London, Charles Blomfield, was worried. He said ‘persons of opposite characters might be carried in the same conveyance… For instance, the body of some profligate spendthrift might be placed in a conveyance with the body of some respectable member of the church, which would shock the feelings of his friends.” His terrrible fears were not realised and the coffins were indeed separated by class.

Spirited Away

The train would depart at 11.35am (11.20am on Sundays) and it would, leaving the smog of the metropolis, steam through the green countryside and arrive at “Necropolis Junction” at 12. 25pm.

Brookwood was unusual in offering Sunday burials. It, therefore, became popular for those who could not afford to take a day off work. It was also popular for the funerals of actors, because theatre was traditionally banned on Sundays, so that would be their day off and actor friends and colleagues could attend.

At its height the railway was transporting around 2,000 bodies a year to Brookwood, taking roughly 200,000 bodies in total over 87 years. 

Famous Funerals 

One of the funerals with the highest attendance at the cemetery was that of MP Charles Bradlaugh. He was a Liberal MP and a staunch atheism campaigner, founding the National Secular Society in 1866. He was also a key supporter of Indian self-governance, so his funeral, after he died on the 20th January 1891, was attended by around 3,000 people, including many Indians, among them a 21 year old Mahatma Ghandi. 

Woking Crematorium, not far from the cemetery, was established in 1878. The LNC therefore had an agreement that mourners could use the railway to attend cremations there as well. Occasionally due to personal or religious reasons a funeral would not be able to take place in a church. One of the waiting rooms of the terminus could in these circumstances be turned into a makeshift funeral chapel.

This was the case for the funeral of Friedrich Engels, co-author of the Communist Manifesto with Karl Marx, on the 10th August 1895. He was then taken on the train to Woking Crematorium to be cremated. Eleanor Marx, Karl Marx’s daughter, also interestingly had her funeral in the waiting room of the station in 1898 and was also cremated at Woking Crematorium. 

The Railway Shuts Down 

In the 20th century, demand for the Necropolis Railway started to decline. This was due to a number of factors: the growth in the number of municipal cemeteries in London, the advent of the motor car and the increase in demand for cremation. 

On the 16th/17th April 1941 a Blitz bombing raid destroyed much of the infrastructure of the railway. It was decided, after the War, to not reopen the railway. 

The terminus building on Westminster Bridge Road survived and went through a variety of purposes, mostly as offices. It has been unused for quite a few years now, but recently sold for £3 million. You can see its Rightmove listing here, sold, it looks like, to become, to the surprise of no-one, luxury apartments.

If you look at the building on Google Maps, you can see the railway track coming into the back of it.

A Visit To Brookwood

I also paid a visit to Brookwood, to see what clues there are to the railway. It is still the largest cemetery in the UK, so I was only able to get round a small portion of it. 

There is a special entrance from the train station straight into the cemetery. 

Immediately on the left is a brand new, as of 2025, reflective memorial garden.

This was set up as part of the Railway 200 (200 years of Network Rail) celebrations. It is a memorial to the London Necropolis Railway, as well as lost railway colleagues and friends. It is made from old railway sleepers and there is a section of old railway track. 

One of the walkways in the cemetery is called Railway Avenue. It runs along the top of a bank of earth that marks the route of the old spur of railway track that once ran into the cemetery. 

Notable Graves

Some of the graves have a sign saying ‘Notable Grave’ and a QR to find out more. For example, below is the mausoleum of Daniel Nichols, a French-born restaurateur who founded the Café Royal, later Hotel Café Royal, on Regent Street.

He had to flee France due to bankruptcy and arrived in London with just £5 to his name. His restaurant though became the place to be seen in the 1890s, with clientele including Oscar Wilde, Virginia Woolf, Winston Churchill, Noel Coward and many more. 

Brookwood Military Cemetery

You can also see the Brookwood Military Cemetery, the largest Commonwealth war cemetery in the UK. 

Part of it is the American Cemetery. Here you can find the graves of nearly 470 American servicemen and women who were killed in World War One.

At one end is this white stone chapel. Inside are names of over 560 Americans who were missing at sea and therefore do not have marked graves. 

One of the great tragedys of the war was the sinking of the US Coastguard cutter Tampa. It went down with the loss of all hands on 26th September 1918, after an attack from a German submarine. It was the largest American naval loss of the war.

Brookwood also had the first Muslim Cemetery in Britain, as well as the only Zoroastrian burial ground in Britain. It therefore has a really amazing variety of religions and different sections. It also therefore has so many different styles of grave and mausoleum.

The striking mausoleum below for example, with its golden dome, is the burial place of HRH Sharif Al-Hussein Ben Ali (1919-1998), a member of the Iraqi royal family which was ousted in 1958.

Other notable burials include those of John Singer Sargent and Dr Richard Pankhurst, lawyer and husband of Suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst. 

Visiting Brookwood

If you would like to visit Brookwood, you get train from Waterloo Station out to Brookwood. As mentioned previously, there is a special entrance straight from the station into the cemetery. Opening hours are 8am-5pm everyday.

You can find out more on their website here. It also looks like the Brookwood Cemetery Society run regular guided tours.

Thank you for reading, more of London’s fascinating historical spots below.